HOMECOMING WEATHER #2
"He knew," I say, and I'm surprised by how easily it comes out, how much I mean it. "He wasn't a man who needed things said out loud to know they were true."
Micah looks at me then, and for a second the fourteen months fall away and it's just us, the way it used to be, two people who understood each other without a lot of unnecessary words.
Then his eyes catch on something at my collarbone, and I realize the pendant has slipped free of my collar sometime in the last hour, the small iron ring pattern resting plain against the black of my dress.
I watch a whole history cross his face in the space of that look.
There's the boy Hollis pulled off scrap-hauling duty and put a chisel in his hands.
There's the man who once told me, half joking, half not, that he'd rather lose a finger than lose the ability to work stone, because stone was the one thing in his life that had never once let him down.
And there's the man standing in front of me now, thirty-two years old, dressed wrong for a funeral in a shirt that doesn't fit him the way his cut does, still somehow the most familiar person in a room full of familiar faces.
He doesn't say anything about it. But I watch him see it, watch something move behind his eyes, and I tuck it back beneath the fabric with a hand that isn't quite steady.
"I should go find Birdie," I say, which is true, and also an exit.
"Wren." His hand doesn't touch me, doesn't even come close, but something in his voice does. "I know you didn't come back for me. I know that. But I'm glad you're here."
I don't answer him. I walk away instead, out toward the coffee table where my sister is standing with her arms wrapped around herself like she's cold in a room that's actually too warm, and I let myself feel exactly nothing about the fact that Micah Rourke is glad I'm home, because feeling anything about it at all is a door I am not ready to open on the day I buried my uncle.
Outside, later, loading Birdie into my truck, the first cold rain of the season starts, fine and gray, more mist than storm.
Before we leave, Nan catches my elbow in the parking lot, presses a small paper bag into my hands, still warm.
Inside, wrapped in a paper towel, are two of the little sandwiches from the reception table, the same kind Hollis always requested for every gathering this town ever held, ham and swiss on rye, cut into precise triangles.
"You didn't eat today," Nan says. "I watched. Man, you were so busy taking care of everybody else's grief you forgot you're allowed to have your own body's needs too."
"I'm fine, Nan."
"You're thirty-one years old and I've known you since you were in diapers, Wren Halvorsen.
Don't tell me you're fine when I can see you barely holding it together from ten feet away.
" She squeezes my arm, gentler now. "Eat something in the truck.
Get your sister home. Sleep if you can manage it, and if you can't, at least lie still and let your body rest even if your mind won't cooperate.
Tomorrow's soon enough for the rest of it. "
I take the bag. I don't argue, because there's no version of arguing with Nan that ends any way but her being right, and some small, tired part of me is grateful, standing there in the parking lot with rain starting to spit from a darkening sky, to have at least one person in this whole complicated homecoming telling me plainly what I need instead of leaving me to guess at it alone.
Homecoming weather, Hollis used to call it, the kind of rain that doesn't so much fall as arrive, settling over the town like it's been waiting all along for someone to come back and get wet in it.
I drive my sister home through it, wipers on the slowest setting, and I don't look in the rearview mirror at the funeral home lights going small behind us, because I already know what I'll see if I do.
Birdie doesn't talk much on the drive, just stares out the passenger window at the rain-streaked dark, and I let the silence sit between us rather than filling it with false comfort neither of us particularly needs right now. At a stoplight near the edge of town, she finally speaks.
"Everybody kept asking me if I was okay," she says. "Like there's a right answer to that. Like I'm supposed to say yes so they can stop worrying and go back to their sandwiches."
"You don't owe anybody a performance of okay, Birdie. Not tonight, not ever."
"Are you okay?" she asks, and there's something in her voice, young and old at once, that makes my chest ache.
"No," I say, honestly, because she deserves honesty more than she deserves comfort right now. "But I'm here. That's not the same thing as okay, but it's something."
She nods, seems to accept that, and rests her head against the cold window for the rest of the drive, and I keep both hands steady on the wheel through rain that's started coming down harder now, homecoming weather, exactly the kind Hollis used to name without ever explaining why it deserved a name at all.
Micah, standing under the green awning, not moving, watching the truck go.